


come on, superman

by serpentheir



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Birthday, Childhood Friends, Gen, High School, Jughead Jones-centric, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:21:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23653780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serpentheir/pseuds/serpentheir
Summary: just a bunch of short little jughead-centric oneshots, no particular rhyme or reason or organization here but they're fun to write.i'm gonna leave it "unfinished" for the foreseeable future so i can keep adding to it.comments are much appreciated! you can find me on tumblr at @jugheadsucks if you have some thoughts or perhaps some feelings.
Relationships: Archie Andrews & Jughead Jones, Archie Andrews/Jughead Jones, FP Jones II & Jughead Jones
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	1. 16th birthday

**Author's Note:**

> i have so many thoughts but i haven't been able to turn many of them into coherent writing...but maybe quarantine will change that because what else is there for me to do  
> 

When Archie turns sixteen, Fred buys himself a reasonably-priced, reasonably-shaped, little beater of a car and gives Archie the keys to his old truck. Never mind the fact that Archie doesn’t actually _need_ a truck for anything -- it’s less about whether he’ll actually use the truck bed to haul anything, more about the possibility of having all that space just in case. 

The Joneses don’t have the money for _just in case_. 

Two months later, when Jughead turns sixteen, he’s careful not to mention anything about driving. He already knows his dad’s answer; or, at least, he knows it’s a _no_ well enough to keep his mouth shut. Archie drives him to school every morning, and because he’s Archie, he never asks if or when Jughead’s going to get his license.

It’s not that Jughead is against driving -- just the opposite, really: having a license, a car of his own, would be a ticket out of town, not that he’d actually want to leave. Ever since he moved into the trailer with his dad, he’s craved a way to escape. Writing works for a while, and so does being with Archie, but something about hitting the open road feels like a chance for more freedom than he’s ever felt before. Just having the opportunity to get out of Riverdale in his back pocket would be enough reassurance to get him through the rest of the year. Maybe it’s just the capitalism, the materialist pressure telling teenagers that a new car is a necessary rite of passage on their path to adulthood.

Jughead knows not to mention anything to his dad about Archie driving him; he just lets himself quietly out the front door every morning, gets into the passenger seat, and lets the truck’s shitty old motor roar itself to life loud enough to wake everyone in Sunnyside. 

One day, FP answers the question Jughead knew not to ask. 

“Heard Fred gave Archie his truck.”

Jughead waits, knowing nothing he could say would help the situation.

“When I was in school, I wanted a car, I got a job. Bought the cheapest run-down piece of shit car I could find, and kept busting my ass for the rest of high school to keep up with the insurance payments. You think my old man paid for it? Hell no. I made it work on my own, learned how to provide for myself. If you wanna drive so bad, you can get a job and pay for it yourself.”

 _I have a job,_ Jughead thinks. He wonders if his dad forgot.

“I didn’t take Fred for someone who’d coddle his kid like that. Thought he wanted to show Archie how the real world worked. Well, take it from me, _you’re_ gonna have to figure it out someday, or it’ll bite you in the ass. Might as well get used to it now. You’re not gonna have someone looking over your shoulder, paying for everything you need, when you’re out on your own.”

Jughead lets out a vague noise of agreement, and lets the conversation end there. 

Of course he’s pissed at first. Any teenager would be. It takes him a while to realize that maybe his dad had told him to _get a job, learn how the real world works_ because he was too proud to tell him the truth: _we can’t afford it_. 


	2. american football

Sometimes when FP’s in a good mood, he’ll tell Jughead about high school, about football and fixing up his VW bus with Fred.

When FP was in high school, they called him a BMOC – even though someone once spray-painted “FP JONES IS A DOG” on the side of the school – and the girls liked him, and even some of the boys did too. He says that part with a look on his face that Jughead can’t figure out. 

FP had  _ status  _ at school, status that he never really got the chance to have again. It was the kind of status that gave him the wild, ill-advised idea to shave his head into an arrow-shaped mohawk. Fred insisted on helping in a desperate attempt to minimize the damage, but no matter how good he was with clippers, an arrow-shaped mohawk was never actually going to look  _ good _ . It was the kind of popular-football-god power that Jughead would never want in a million years, but he thinks he might like to know how it feels to have a bunch of people who like you and look up to you and trust you to make good decisions, to  _ win _ . Even just once. 

Maybe FP’s been trying to get that feeling back ever since he left high school. Sometimes when he talks to the Serpents, he sounds more like a captain giving his team a pep talk, and Jughead thinks he gets it. Once FP  ~~ gets taken away ~~ is gone, Jughead tries to follow in his footsteps. He orchestrates raids on rival territory like he’s mapping out football plays – not that he has a single clue about football plays. Once, for a second, he considers asking the Serpents to huddle up, but he realizes that would probably finally push Sweet Pea over the edge, and he doesn’t feel like getting punched out today. 


	3. second skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> end of s1e12 or whichever one it is but Expanded ig (this one is bughead-y)

“The jacket’s yours if you want it.”

Jughead paused to think, breath freezing with the rain. He ran through the catalogue of last few days’ events: his father’s arrest, his friends’ betrayal, his mother’s rejection, the dissolution of every safety net he thought he’d had. And here it was: a way out. 

They say when a door closes, a window opens, and maybe this was that window – even if it was more of a run-down trailer park porch than a door, and the opportunity-bearers more leather-clad bikers than angels.

He abandoned the metaphor. All of a sudden he felt the cold seep through his shirt all at once, and he could practically hear his dad's voice saying we're not paying to heat the outside. 

He had to think, really think about what it meant if he said yes. He was being tugged in two directions, feeling Betty’s gaze on him – beautiful, sweet, safe Betty, glaring at him from just inside the door, her gaze strong but so afraid. 

For the first time, a family was knocking on his door. For the first time, he was wanted. 

There was something to be said about shedding his skin to put a new one on, but he’d been surrounded by this gang his whole life; maybe it wasn't new at all. Maybe he wasn’t molting, just growing into who he was always going to be.

Was there any point in pretending he could be something else? He’d always been from the wrong side of the tracks. He’d never tried too hard to deny that, and he'd sure as hell never tried to fit in. He could leave all that behind for something better.

And the penny dropped.

He took the jacket.

It fit him better than it had any right to. As it slid over his shoulders, the rustle of the leather sounded, somehow, like a promise.


	4. the life and times of the serpents apartment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the Teen Serpents™️ move into an apartment together. idk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think abt depictions of class differences in riverdale a lot, and this is sort of the product of me wishing there were more realistic depictions (or just, like, any depictions at all) of what life is like for the serpent kids.

Living in an apartment is fucking annoying. It’s better than the trailer, sometimes, but weirder, too. 

  
One day, Fangs’ mom had just fucked off, went god knows where, and he'd broken down at lunch that day, saying _I can’t stay there on my own, I can’t afford to be there on my own_. Rent’s too expensive, for sure, but more importantly, a kid his age shouldn’t be living alone like that. 

  
(Jughead catches himself thinking this and remembers that he’s the same age as Fangs and he’d lived alone for a long damn time, too. Not that it makes it okay). 

  
He doesn’t remember exactly how the decision was made, or who suggested it, but they all decide to move into Fangs' apartment. 

  
There’s too many of them in a too-small apartment, but they combine all their part-time paychecks and they can actually make it work, at least for a while. At least as long as Mike’s Grocery keeps looking the other way, letting them break child labor laws so they can go there right after school and work till ten at night. It would be fucked up, he thinks, to make kids work such long shifts, except they need it bad enough that he doesn’t care. Can’t afford to care.

  
The apartment’s about the same size as the trailer, actually, but living in a trailers park with a bunch of other people in separate homes is way different than being crammed into one big building with even more people. Every day at five p.m., someone in a nearby apartment starts smoking, and the smoke filters through their air vents and makes the whole apartment smell like weed. 

  
Their upstairs neighbors are a fucking trip. They’re always stomping around and making weird-ass noises – Jughead swears they’re rolling a bowling ball across the floor, because what the fuck else would be making that sound? Sometimes they fight, and the walls are painfully thin, so they can all hear more than they should be able to. 

Once or twice, after the neighbors fought, one of them would lock the other one out, and they would bang on the door for what felt like an hour, until the other one finally unlocked the fucking door.   
Jughead had half a mind to walk upstairs and ask them to shut up, but when he'd brought it up, Toni had given him a Look, and he decided not to. 

They’re on the first floor, and the bedroom he shares with Sweet Pea and Fangs faces the outside of the building, so he hears them fighting outside one morning, too – barely six a.m. and one of them is screaming _Tony, please, just talk to me, Tony, don’t go_ and then a car engine starts and someone drives off and everything’s quiet again, but Jughead still can’t get back to sleep.

  
The fridge door in the apartment is broken in the exact same way the trailer’s fridge was, which is comforting, somehow. After they move in, he shows everyone how to get it to shut – close it, then kick the bottom right corner of the door – and feels very proud of himself for knowing how to do something. 

  
He usually feels like the odd one out with the Serpents, because he’s still kinda the new kid (at least, Sweet Pea still treats him like he is) and he’s the only one, as far as he can tell, that had ever lived on the Northside, which is code for used to not be poor. 

  
It’s been long enough since his mom left that he’s used to the Southside, now, and everything that comes with it, now: the trailer, the shit public transportation, living off SNAP, the fact that he’s the only one of his friends whose dad is around (and the bar for “around” is pretty low, considering that his dad is in _prison_ ). The fact that it seems like everyone here has a fucked-up home life. 

Some nights, they swap stories like trading cards. 

_I lived with my sister in sophomore year ‘cause I told my mom I didn’t like her new boyfriend and she told me not to come home again._

  
_One time when I was little, my dad got drunk and pissed off and broke our door off its hinges. We didn’t get it fixed for a year._

  
_When I was little, my dad tried to sell me for meth money._

  
_You guys had dads?_

  
As long as they were laughing about it, it felt like all that shit was normal – or, at least, worth more than the trauma it inflicted on them if it made for a good story. 

  
At night, Jughead is usually the last one to go to bed, and he turns out the lights and opens the blinds so he can see outside. There’s one apartment in the building across from them that always has its lights on late at night, and sometimes he can see someone cooking in the kitchen, even though it’s like two a.m. He likes looking at their window, the way the yellow light glows against the shadowy building and the dark blue sky. He feels like kind of a creep, watching the people in the apartment go about their lives, but he figures they can’t see him, and something about watching them makes him feel less lonely.


End file.
